


Doesn't Play Well With Others

by pallasite



Series: Behind the Gloves [103]
Category: Babylon 5, Babylon 5 & Related Fandoms
Genre: Backstory, Betrayal, Cadre Prime, Canon Compliant, Children, Discipline, Emotional Abuse, Episode: s04e21 Rising Star, Essays, Fix-It, Gen, Growing up in the cadre system, How canon misled you, Psi Corps, Telepath culture, The Corps Was Right, The Psi Corps tag is mine, Worldbuilding, psychological abuse, telepaths
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-07
Updated: 2018-04-07
Packaged: 2019-04-18 18:57:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,962
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14219625
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pallasite/pseuds/pallasite
Summary: Canon presents Bester as representing everything the Corps stands for, but actually, in his youth, he got himself in massive amounts of trouble.Reflections on Bester's childhood, cadre life and telepath culture.The prologue ofBehind the Glovesishere- please read!





	Doesn't Play Well With Others

**Author's Note:**

> This chapter contains quotations from Deadly Relations, pages 2-17.
> 
> Brett's surname is not provided in canon, so I provided it in the tags above.
> 
> What is this series? Where are the acknowledgements, table of contents and universe timelines? See [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10184558/chapters/22620590).
> 
> If you like _Behind the Gloves_ and would like to send me an email, I can be reached at counterintuitive at protonmail dot com. Do you have questions? Would you like to tell me what you like about this project? Email me!
> 
> I also have an [ask blog](https://behind-the-gloves.tumblr.com/), a [writing blog](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/pallasite-writes), and a "P3 life" Tumblr [here](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/p3-life) with funny anecdotes. :)

As I've discussed numerous times before in this project, the culture in the Corps is very cooperative and communal, stressing the importance of intra-group harmony over individual desires. Children are taught from a young age, both in class and in play, and through stories and songs, to think first of the group, and never to be selfish (putting their own desires over that of the group). All telepaths are family, full stop. What rogues are doing is wrong not just because the law says so, but because fundamentally, they are putting what they perceive as best for them _personally_ over what is good for telepaths as a people, as a whole, as a community, even endangering others by their choices.

The show itself, backgrounding telepaths so much, and Corps culture to a "funhouse-mirror"-ized footnote, gives viewers little exposure to Corps culture - and thus Deadly Relations' way of introducing readers to the subject is odd. They tell the story from Bester's point of view, both because he's an important person and because he's a memorable character from the show, but that has the effect of introducing readers to the culture almost _backwards_ \- before readers can form any sense of the values and culture for themselves, we see him flagrantly breaking the rules as young as _six_ , and we see the teachers punishing him very harshly for this behavior, all without hardly any context for either why his behavior was so out of line, or why the teachers would punish him in such an extreme way.

So readers are left with the impression of, "the Corps is arbitrary and cruel and generally abusive of children for little reason, or for made up reasons."

We're also told the Corps is collective in its values, yet the point of view character consistently separates himself from the group, even acts "antisocially." And ironically, this is not to make him a more sympathetic character from an individualistic, mundane, Western point of view, "rebelling" against collective values - he's still presented as "evil incarnate" in the show.

With writing like this, you can't win.

So, as always, I'm going to tell you what they didn't tell you.

When children are little, as I showed in [Emily's stories](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10402923), everything they do is collective. They eat together, sleep together, play together, even bathe together. Even at five, they'd still buddy up to go to the potty.

What does the book open with? Bester and the other kids are six years old. Everyone is supposed to be playing together, but they're not, in part because Bester decides to leave the group and go off and climb a tree all by himself, and see how high he can climb.

He gets pretty high up in the tree - higher than even Brett can climb, and he's the tallest. Bester has no idea how he'll get _down_ \- he just wants to climb higher than anyone else can, and hopefully impress one of the girls.

The girls aren't impressed.

Brett asks him to come down from the tree and play with the other kids, so they all don't get in trouble for wasting all of constructive play time doing nothing approved. (Again, punishment is collective if the group as a whole doesn't do what it should be doing, and that collective punishment can be _harsh_.) The kids are laughing at him, stuck up there in the tree, Bester tries to jump for a branch, misjudges, misses grabbing onto it correctly, and ends up hanging there, moments from falling.

Brett decides to climb up and help Bester get out of the tree - again, being cooperative - which Bester resents, so he just drops himself down to a lower limb, risking his own safety so he doesn't have to face the embarrassment of Brett coming to "rescue" him.

"You were lucky," says Brett. "You should have waited for me to help you. You shouldn't even be trying to climb it alone - this is constructive play time. We're supposed to play together. Will you come down now?"

The kids end up playing one of the approved games (a variant of tag, basically), and Brett just can't figure Bester out. "You're not a bad guy, Alfie," Brett says, "just a little weird. ... You're always playing alone, always have, even when we were really little. ... People wanna like you - the cadre's gotta hang together - but you're just a little too weird. You need to act more regular, you know?"

The book, in focusing on just him, and relegating everyone else to "minor background character" if they're named at all, doesn't help things either. There's not much time in the book devoted to showing cadre life - we have some scenes the week when Bester is six and turns seven (a section that starts with this tree scene), and then the ritual when Bester and the others graduate from the cadres (discussed [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12665913) and [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12680634)). And that's all canon tells us about the cadre system, Talia's one brief line aside.

The writing and character development in these brief scenes don't emphasize the collective, interconnected nature of cadre life and Corps culture - we have one developed character (Bester), a few minor characters around him who get a bit of character development (Brett gets the most, because he, alone, comes back later), and that's it. We never even get to see, on screen, typical cadre life or typical cadre culture, other than in a few snippets. The writing itself picks one child out of the group, a child who consistently and intentionally pulls himself out of the group, and focuses just on him. We see very little of the bonds children form with each other and maintain into adolescence and adulthood - and only later see it from afar, from Bester's point of view, [as an outsider literally looking in](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10358895/chapters/22887570) (the same canon story from Milla's point of view). And Bester's not an outsider because he's born outside the Corps, to a normal family, but because he's just "weird like that."

And IMO, that's a backwards way to introduce readers to a culture, especially when readers have no other canon source material to read and learn from. (The writers had a different agenda.)

It's actually not just backwards - it's misleading. Readers see pieces with no context. They have no context, for instance, for the game the children are playing ("cops and blips"). All the readers are going to get from this is something like, "sort of a combination of tag and political indoctrination, because the Corps brainwashes everyone from the time they're little" - or whatever they want readers to think.

IMO, the writing plays the political element up, because of stuff that happens later in the book (and in the show). It's not that kids don't play make-believe with what they know about (including this), it's that they're only showing these pieces because they need everything to be "relevant" to later material seen in the books and on-screen.

Note: Life and identity in the Corps is not defined "in relation to" or "in contrast to" rogue telepaths (despite the many, many different ways rogue telepaths come up in this chapter). Daily life for kids in the Corps has nothing to do with rogue telepaths, other than when they're playing make-believe or watching fictional vids. The book is showing you _only_ these pieces because the authors have their own agenda to define life in the Corps, the culture of the Corps, and the identity of people in the Corps not on their own terms (or else the culture would be fleshed out and shown), but only "in contrast to" the life of rogues, as if these are somehow "co-equal" pieces politically, historically, and narratively.

**The book wants you to believe that every aspect of the daily life of these kids is defined by a certain political slant, when to create that effect, the book _itself,_ here, demonstrates that political slant.**

Anyway.

The kids are running around getting exercise on a warm day, playing an approved, cooperative game. Whether the kids pretend to be - Cops and Blips or whatever else - the point is to "pretend" to be competing with the others in your cadre, while never _actually_ competing (Group A chases Group B, then they switch roles and Group B chases Group A - and the groups are random every day). The games and their outcomes are predictable, because the point isn't who "wins" or "loses," but the process of playing itself. The real point of the games is to have fun, be social, and to play cooperatively. That's literally why such recreational time is called CONSTRUCTIVE PLAY.

Bester, however, doesn't play well with others. First, he's off climbing a tree, keeping the others from playing the game they're supposed to. (They are all supposed to play together - the cadre can't do what it's supposed to do if one member won't play along.) And when he does come down from the tree and play, he makes up his own rules mid-game, and decides he's going to beat everyone else and "win" by these new rules he himself just made up.

At first he plays along, sort of.

 _Which goal should we aim for?_ he asks Brett.

_The statue would be the hardest. I say that one._

_Okay. I'll lead them off toward the rail station and then double back._

_No! We should stick together._

_Why? Blips wouldn't._

_Yes they would. Blips are dumb. That's why they're Blips._

_You want to get caught?_ Al glyphed the other kids laughing at them.

_No. But Blips are supposed to stick together._

_That's not a real rule._

          _No. But it's what we're supposed to do._

Again, because the point of the game isn't to find some creative strategy to outsmart the other side and "win," but the play cooperatively.

Bester won't have anything to do with it, through, because "people were more impressed when you won," and so, since Brett won't play along and split up to trick the others, he decides to take matters into his own hands.

 _I'm not really a Blip, I'm a Psi Cop_ , he decides in his own head. _Brett may be a Psi Cop, like me, or he may be on the side of the rogues, and planning to double cross me later. The others are all rogues, coming for me._ So ostensibly he follows Brett's plan and runs off with him to find a place to hide (so they can see where the others are going, and go in a different direction). Brett lays a false trail, and they wait and watch as some of the others fall for it. But then another group from the cadre finds them, and Bester decides in his own head that "Brett was a traitor - one of the rogues. [He] had been planted in Psi Corps to betray Al."

That group chases them, Brett and Bester hide again, and with a telepathic illusion, they confuse the others, who run past their hiding place. But Bester senses another group approaching, and hides, 'casting another telepathic illusion to make Brett look like Bester. And then telepathically dazes Brett, intentionally, so he'd just stand there confused while the others "catch" him, and Bester could run off for the goal before anyone could stop him, and thus "win" the game in his own head.

He doesn't just "change the rules" (which is a positive trope in Western values... think Kirk and the Kobayashi Maru). He doesn't change the rules to get out of an actual adverse "no win" situation. He takes a game which was fundamentally not about "winning" and "losing" at all, turns it into such a game in his own head, and then cheats to "win" it. Not just cheated - he telepathically assaults his cadremate. He "sacrifices" Brett to the others, making sure he got "caught," so he (Bester) could get away and "win."

Basically everything that you're _not_ supposed to do in "constructive play" - play competitively and screw over people on your own side.

(Yes, canon drags these scenes back later when Bester meets up with Brett again much later in life, and in the beginning of the third book when Everyone Is After Him after the Telepath War, and he needs to use some of these same tactics to survive - but this scene doesn't (shouldn't) merely exist for "foreshadowing value" or to be contrasted with later events. What it _should_ be about is showing readers the values of the Corps, values that get shredded all around during the Telepath War. The underlying _cultural_ piece in this scene, about values in the Corps, gets mostly skipped over, here and elsewhere in the books.)

Anyway, the whole cadre is (justifiably) pissed off at Bester. Brett tells the teachers (off-screen). Later that day, three of the teachers [dress up in terrifying costumes](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12665913) and come for Bester, in class, in front of everyone. The Corps being collective, punishment is also collective, and shame is the central component. They scan him and humiliate him in front of his classmates. And in this component of the punishment is just about brutal, public humiliation - he doesn't even understand yet what he's done wrong, though he knows it had something to do with the events earlier that day.

Brett regrets having told the teachers, as he tells Bester that night before bed (they share a room). In hindsight, not only does he feel the punishment was worse than the "crime," he also likely feels that for the cadre as a whole, witnessing this public shaming ritual was far worse than the impact of just letting Bester get away with playing a game in an unfair way. He's thinking about the good of the group. (These kids are all Cadre Prime, manifested telepaths - what hurts one _literally_ [hurts all](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14114901).) He'd urged Bester to come down from the tree and play with the others precisely to protect the cadre from being punished by "the Grins," and when he told the teachers about how Bester had played unfairly, he was mostly just really angry - he didn't think they'd really do it.

They did it.

But not simply because Bester had played in a competitive way. That's not "Grin-level punishment" bad.

Not all competition is unhealthy, or frowned upon - when students in the Corps get older, they find themselves competing with each other academically, and for coveted positions with the Corps. And by itself, it's not of much significance that Bester imagined himself to be a Psi Cop, and not a Blip (kids all take turns - "Psi Cop" one day and "Blip" the next). The issue is that the students (and teachers, and everyone) in the Corps should always comport themselves as members of the Corps, not screw over other telepaths to "get ahead." That's why it's especially bad that he pretended to be a Psi Cop - even if Blips do this, Psi Cops do _not_ do this. (Even pretending to Blips, you're still not supposed to do this.)

And what he did, as Teacher Hua said when the Grins arrived in his class, "brought shame upon the Corps."

          "[T]he three figures rustled toward him, hands lifting. As one, they stripped off their black gloves. The sight was worse, far worse, than seeing a nurse preparing a needle to take blood. His scalp tingled with a rush of terror.

          "They laid their hands on him, and he tried not to block, he really did, but it was like trying not to blink when someone swung at your face. And so it hurt even more as they tunneled into his mind, found his sins, dragged them out in bright glyphs, mindcasting them for everyone to see.

          "When they finally let him go, he came to himself again, gasping, sweat pouring down his face. The whole class had witnessed his misery.

          "They had to help him up because he was trembling too violently to walk. Tears welled behind his eyes, but he would not cry, could not, not on top of everything else.

          "Their gloves were still off. They weren't done yet."

As I pointed out in my essays about Cadre Prime [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12665913) and [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12680634), the teachers in that cadre - unique among all cadres in the Corps - are especially brutal. They use public humiliation to discipline (and terrify) the children - here, as young as six (going on seven in telepath age reckoning). But underneath their arguably excessive methods, the larger lessons that they are trying to teach the children about community life and values _aren't wrong_. I fear that this nuance gets lost on readers between the bad writing, the culture shock, and the immediate focus on the teachers' excessive brutality.

It's not _untrue_ \- Cadre Prime was brutal like that. But there's a lot more going on here than simply "Bester was abused as a child."

          "They took him, alone, to where he had done it, where the others had caught Brett. They stood him in the very spot, in the door frame, and stepped back to regard him. Their masks were unadorned now - blank ovals of plastic.

           ""What did you do?" The Grins had strange voices, inflectionless, like an Artificial Intelligence. Some thought that's exactly what they were, robots, though robots were supposed to be illegal.

          ""I... I betrayed Brett."

          "A sharp stab into his mind. "You don't believe that. Why?"

          ""He was playing dumb. He was going to get us caught. I wanted to win the game."

          ""You betrayed a member of the Corps. You cannot win - not at that cost."

          ""We were pretending to be Blips. Blips betray each other."

          "They crowded nearer, and one pointed an ungloved hand at him. "That is a lie. The others were pretending you two were rogues. You were not. You imagined yourself a Psi Cop, chased by rogues.

          ""But it runs deeper than that, Mr. Bester. No matter what any of you were pretending, you are all members of the Corps. Whatever you pretend in the course of constructive! - or unconstructive - play, Brett is your brother. You share the same mother and father. Do you understand?"

          ""Yessir," Al replied, bowing his head. "The Corps is mother. The Corps is father."

          ""You can't forget that Brett is your brother without forgetting that the Corps is your mother and your father. Do you understand?"

          ""Yessir."

          "You won't forget." It wasn't a question, but a promise. The three stepped forward and laid hands on him again, one behind him and one to each side.

          "For an instant, nothing happened, and then, suddenly, the world grew brighter. The steps where Brett had hidden suddenly came alive, each grain in the stone became a universe of significance. The buildings, the lawn, the trees - all burned into his mind with terrifying, hyper-real clarity. Shame shaped the light; fear framed the image, permeated it.

          "The Grins lowered their hands. They put their gloves on and led him back to class."

The issue isn't even only that he betrayed another member of the Corps - it's that he betrayed another telepath _at all_. Psi Cops shouldn't be chasing rogues for the personal glory - they do so to keep law and order and the fragile peace of the Charter that protects all telepaths, Corps and otherwise, from genocide.

And when other telepaths must be "sacrificed," it's _only_ for the Corps, not for one's personal gain.

So yes, in the children's vids, "rogues are stupid and betray each other," and but the real point is to say that good telepaths never, never hurt each other for "personal reasons" - selfish reasons.

It takes Bester a while to learn these lessons - at age fourteen, he runs away from school to chase rogue telepaths on his own, and gets not only one of the rogues killed, but also a Psi Cop who had come to rescue him (to rescue Bester). And he almost dies in a Parisian back alley, shot in the chest. It took more than a telepathic ass-whooping from the Grins, when he was six years old, to teach him some sense.

But learn the lessons he eventually does. When he's around thirty-four, and he comes home from a mission to find his wife _literally in bed having sex with another man_ , does he react with violence? No. No, he drops the flowers he's carrying, turns, and walks out. Could he have killed the guy? Probably, since he had the element of surprise. His wife's lover had no idea he was walking in. But it doesn't even cross his mind to do so. Nor does he respond with violence toward his wife - because however much they have betrayed him _personally_ , violence is not _personal_. It is done for the good of the Corps (and the Earth Alliance), and for this purpose _only_. The Grins, after all, used violence on him and the other children only for the good of the Corps.

Both Alisha and Jared (her lover) were both P12s. It's not simply that murder would end his career - harming other P12s (or any telepaths for personal reasons) would _shame the Corps_.

So it's literally unthinkable.

His marriage falls apart, but he takes some small consolation in the fact that the child Alisha had with this other man turned out to be a strong P12, for the Corps.

          * All telepaths are family, even rogues - and telepaths are _never_ to hurt each other for personal gain, ever, full stop, the end. When telepaths have to hurt each other (e.g. Psi Cops capturing rogues), it's never for themselves, but for the Corps - _because they have no choice_. It's the last resort.

          (Meanwhile, guess who does assault or even kill telepaths for personal reasons, or for personal gain? Mundanes. All the time. I've discussed Ivanova at length, but have plenty to say about Sinclair, Sheridan, Garibaldi, and even Franklin.)

That's why this little clip from _Rising Star_ is a game of "how many mundane lies can we pack into three sentences?"

          Sheridan: You know what the difference is between you and me, Bester? You use people because you like it, and if someone gets hurt in the process, well, that's life. Using telepaths to take over ships from the other side was the hardest decision I ever made.

(As he's talking to the guy who just literally broke with _all the norms of the Corps_ to sacrifice the lives of six of his best pilots for Sheridan's ass, while I'm sure Sheridan lost no sleep whatsoever about ordering the murder of dozens of innocent telepath _civilian patients who had been tortured by the Shadows_... using them as "weapons components" to disable other EarthForce ships so fewer _normals_ would die in Sheridan's personal fight with other factions in EarthGov. But I guess he gets to lecture since, as he says in that same little speech, he's already come back from the dead, and as the new Jesus, he doesn't have to give a fuck, certainly not about telepath lives. /sigh/ It's so much easier for him to sacrifice the lives of _someone else's people_ , you see, innocents who posed no threat to him or to his people in any way - people who aren't even really considered "people" by law in the same way as normals are. If telepaths were people to him, he wouldn't be [laughing with Ivanova](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10507632) about the time she tossed a telepath out a window. He wouldn't have covered for Ivanova's once-attempted, once-threatened murder of Bester - two incidents. He wouldn't later refer to Byron's people as telepaths "in his back pocket," like little tools for his personal use. Hardest decision he's ever made - MY ASS.)

Back to the original scene with the Grins:

          * Even if Bester had been pretending to be a rogue in the game, had he done the same thing to Brett, he would still have been punished - because he's not a rogue in real life, and neither are his cadremates. It is one of the fundamental values in the Corps that telepaths do not betray each other. (This is super important for anyone who wants to understand what happened in the Telepath War, because so many things fell apart in that war and its aftermath, including the fundamental pillars of telepath society.)

            Just because they're playing rogues "in the game" doesn't mean they're actually supposed to act like rogues (selfishly) - all the children know this. Bester knows this, too, but he didn't care. He wanted to "win," even if it meant telepathically stunning his cadremate/brother, and that's what most concerns the teachers.

          * And he imagined himself as a Psi Cop doing this, no less, not as a rogue - as a Psi Cop "make-believe" getting his brother captured or killed so he could save his own skin.

That's why they telepathically turned him inside out.

Now, Ms. Chastain. That evening, Bester doesn't watch the vid with the other children, and decides to wander off alone - again. He quickly runs into one of the teachers, Ms. Chastain, who is the kindest of the teachers in his cadre house. She may herself have been one of the Grins who came to punish him earlier - who exactly did it is not clear, but all the teachers are in it together. She decides to offer him some cookies and try to explain to him why the Grins did it, since he really doesn't understand.

She tells him the story of her grandmother, murdered by normals in front of her mother, who was small at that time. Ms. Chastain, though in her early or mid-twenties, is aware of the larger context in which the Corps exists, and the larger context in which telepaths live. She, like all the teachers, was herself raised in Cadre Prime, but she has also been out in the larger world. (This is probably her first year as a teacher, because I ran the math - teachers in Cadre Prime stay with the students from ages six to thirteen, and she can't be old enough to have been a teacher for eight years.)

          _We're special, Al, all of us. The normals know it, and they hate us for it. And there are so many more of them than there are of us, so many. If we don't stand together, all of us - if we aren't stronger and smarter and better than them - they'll do it again, like they did to my grandmother._

_So when you think you've been treated harshly, remember that._

She understands what she and the other teachers are doing - harsh as it is - in the larger context of telepath life and telepath history. And though the methods of Cadre Prime are uniquely harsh, _these lessons are not wrong._

They do, however, get lost in the bad writing here, that drops this and never comes back to it - either to transferred memory as a way of educating, warning and protecting the next generation, or to the fundamental importance of telepath unity - absolute mutual guarantee - as protection from genocide. Whatever the teachers do to the children pales in comparison to what mundanes do to telepaths - and would do, if given the chance.

          _It's to make you strong and good, to get you ready for the challenges that come later. Because even though many normals hate us, it's still our job to protect them, too. From themselves, from enemies out in the stars. And you, Al - you're really strong - you test P12, and if you train well you can live up to that potential. You will have to be more responsible than most. You'll look back one day and understand everything that happened to you. You'll see that it was for the greater good. Do you understand?_

          He managed a little smile. _Yes._

          _Good. How about another cookie?_

The only wrong note is "from enemies out in the stars" - that's the author trying to force some foreshadowing in here, even though Ms. Chastain would have absolutely no way to know about the threat of the Shadows (this is 2196!). The only one who knows about this is Director Vacit, and that's because he's received some sort of vision from Vorlons when his mother died. It _does_ make sense when Vacit tells Bester about the Shadows, a few scenes later - but Ms. Chastain, no. No, she just knows what happened in her own family, and that Bester is a young P12 prodigy. He will probably become a Psi Cop, and Psi Cops have unique responsibilities to protect everyone else (normal and telepath alike). It is extra special important that a future Psi Cop learn that violence is _never_ personal, and _only_ used (as a last resort) to protect telepaths, to protect the Corps, to protect the Earth Alliance. Not for personal glory. Not to "win." Not because he wants to be "the best," or to "show someone" to get even with them. Not to impress a girl. Not to save his own ass.

And good telepaths - telepaths in the Corps - do not betray other telepaths. Ever. If they must sacrifice their own, it's _for the Corps_ _._

(I think "from themselves" could refer to court telepaths helping normals identify the murders of other normals, but it's unclear.)

If the full meaning of this scene had been adequately fleshed out in the book, we could see how it also (sadly) sets up for the events at the end of the third book - Bester uses violence on Louise, justifying it to himself that it's "to protect her" and "for her own good," but really, it's to cover his own ass. And when he realizes this, seeing her in the crowd at the trial, he realizes just how lost he really is. No Corps, no family, no Louise - and now, not even the principles on which he has built his life.

He is one man, but all of telepath society finds itself similarly lost in the aftermath of the war.


End file.
